Top 50 Albums of 2003

It always seems to take a new decade a few years to decide what it wants to be. 2003 was the first year that felt like a fully formed part of the 00's. For the first time, we completely ignored any and everything affiliated with the 1990s, instead embracing 80s excess, while music, finally, seemed ready to look forward. Few previously established bands delivered on the promise of their previous records; instead, an entirely new crop of songwriters and artists burrowed out the woodwork, laying the foundation for the decade as it will be remembered when we leave it six years from now. Which had an interesting effect on our staff: for the first time since Pitchfork's inception, none of us had any clue as to what might take our the list's top spot. Frankly, we're pretty psyched about the results: this has to be our most diverse year-end list to date, and many of the albums we felt deserved more attention than we were able to dedicate to them during the year get their due. We hope you enjoy listening to these records as much as we did. See you in '04.

50: Supersilent__6____
[Rune Grammofon]__

The most somber release from Norway's Supersilent is possibly the heaviest record of the year. The quartet has the improvising chops of jazz musicians, but on 6, they blur their organic lines into dark smears of color; gutteral patterns and buzzing, primitive electric chords jut out like the country's sharp mountain ridges against orange winter dusks. The mood is like floating smoke, but clears in sudden bursts-- like the dawnbreak of "6.6", or the climax of "6.3" that sounds like a choir in an underwater cave. Not many albums can create an atmosphere while stimulating you with the details, shock your attention and then sedate you with stretches of grace. But it's the group's style that's most compelling, the sound of four people exploring a common ground that subsumes their own voices: just as the band has said that no other combination of members could be Supersilent, nobody else could make this music. --Chris Dahlen

49: Cyann & Ben * __
Spring__ * __
[Gooom]__

Thus spoketh Circe to the man of many turns: "To the Sirens first shalt thou come, who beguile all men whosoever comes to them. Whoso in ignorance draws near to them and hears the Sirens' voice, he nevermore returns, that his wife and little children may stand at his side rejoicing, but the Sirens beguile him with their clear-toned song, as they sit in a meadow, and about them is a great heap of bones of mouldering men, and round the bones the skin is shrivelling." As Dr. Murray turns Homer, so French quartet Cyann & Ben, label brethren and compatriots of M83, translate spacy mid-period Flying Saucer Attack and the expansive compositions of Sigur Rós to forth Spring, one of 2003's most secretly compelling releases. It is epos in its most inverted sense; Cyann & Ben are dramatic but hardly overblown. They, like the namesake of the album's fourth track, "Siren Song", are beguiling, their potency never cosmetic, always noble and still, ultimately irresistible. Thy comrades, would that thee never anoint thine ears with sweet wax. --Nick Sylvester

48: Saturday Looks Good to Me

All Your Summer Songs * __
[Polyvinyl]__

Just to prove how wonderful the traditional form of pop music can be when flawlessly executed, Saturday Looks Good to Me hearkens back to the classic sound of the 50s and 60s-- saxophones, doo-wop harmonies, bells, tambourines, timpani, and soaring, dreamy orchestration. Like channeling the ghost of Brian Wilson or Phil Spector's famed "wall of sound" as heard floating up from the bottom of the sea, All Your Summer Songs isn't strictly a retro-polished throwback, either. Saturday mainman Fred Thomas follows lines similar to Stephin Merritt's work with The Magentic Fields: attention to the utterly timeless structure at the foundation that gave rise to not only modern pop music, but also to Chuck Berry and the first fledgling steps toward rock 'n' roll, and updates only as necessary, only at the fringes. It's often as simple as a few studio quirks, or heavy reverb to echo, paradoxically, the primitive production of elder decades, but it's all essential, making the golden, breezy melodies of All Your Summer Songs old and new, timeless and just-current-enough all at once. --Eric Carr

47: George

The Magic Lantern * __
[Pickled Egg]__

One of two majestic, graceful avant-folk records that captured a sense of geography this year, George's The Magic Lantern combined jumble-sale instrumentation, found-sound percussion, and whispering-woods acoustic guitars to create evocative, rustic English pop. Singer Suzy Mangion's haunting voice hovers and floats through faded-photograph arrangements like an ominous cloud, creating alternating senses of wonder and doom that seem swiped from the celluloid of a Hammer horror film. Like Piano Magic's Glen Johnson-- for whom Mangion has provided vocals-- George excel at graceful texture and off-kilter balladry. Comparisons to Low catch the mood of some of the tracks but ignore the band's eccentricity and versatility: George transports a listener more than lulls and hypnotizes them, whether that experience is being "Alone in the Country House" or looking over you shoulder for a "stranger in the woods." --Scott Plagenhoef

46: M. Ward

Transfiguration of Vincent * __
[Merge]__

Even in the deepest cold of winter, this album warms the blood like few others. An open tribute to a deceased friend, Transfiguration of Vincent is catharsis at its prettiest and most affecting, pulling threads of American folk and Brill Building classicism into a singularly timeless knot. The sentiment is simple, but not simplistic: "He only sings when he's sad/ And he's sad all the time," Ward lilts on the sweeping sad-sack anthem "Vincent O'Brien", his strangely coarse falsetto feeling its way through the melody. The album moves like a fever dream from back porch guitar rhapsodies and ancient-sounding Tin Pan Alley shuffles to freight-train folk-rock like "Helicopter" and the most stunning, sensual version of Bowie's "Let's Dance" you'll ever hear. Transfiguration of Vincent is captivating in its honesty and imperfection, a majestic threnody fully disembodied from time and place. --Joe Tangari

45: Ms. John Soda

No P. or D. * __
[Morr Music]__

Wilheim, Germany-based newcomers Ms. John Soda hit with No P. or D. early in 2003, an understated IDM-pop masterpiece that saw collaborators Stefanie Bohm (keyboardist from the Munich post-rock band Couch) and Micha Acher (bassist/trumpeter of Wilheim's prestigious electro-pop quartet The Notwist) expertly alter the landscape of contemporary songwriting while channeling their love affair with digital glitchouts through an array of disparate genres. Songs like "Misco" and "Hiding/Fading" both lay gloriously spliced and reversed vocals loops atop the melodic shoegazing hum of dirty, interweaving guitar lines, while the radiating acoustic bass, unraveling piano notes, and decorous horns of "Solid Ground" may constitute lap-pop's first stab at Brian Wilson-esque pop balladry. Where so many "side project" run high on ambition but lack substance, No P. or D. has enough pop ingenuity to make most "real" groups green with envy. --Hartley Goldstein

2003 was a quietly great year for electronic music; not because of the breakthroughs, but because groups like transcontinental duo Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman demonstrated how aspects of electronic composition and production are seamlessly integrated into music everywhere. Bousha Blue Blazes is their powerfully emotionally resonant hybrid of traditional folk and field recordings, musique concrete and laptop manipulation. The "songs" here consist of found bits of Bergman's grandmother Bousha singing to herself, sometimes accompanied by the radio, passersby, glitchy computer noises or even her old baby grand. The music proceeds not as a collection of short pieces, but rather like a single, concise documentary film. Along the way, scenes from the Spanish village where Bousha lives are presented with what feels like grand cinematography, and we're left with a modest portrait of an obviously warm, creative soul. Salinas and Bergman have fashioned an artistic document to sit alongside Alan Lomax's series of folk recordings, and in the process, raised a signpost for the next generation of laptop compassionates. --Dominique Leone

We music geeks all note, mentally or in finely cataloged notebooks, those upcoming albums we anticipate most, knowing full well the records we likely log highest into the Year End Best Of notebook were those that dropped out of the blue. The Fiery Furnaces created no radar blip, which added to the immense pleasure of discovery. Beyond that, the duo's skewed blues refreshingly followed no trends. It's hard to even discern a precedent, beyond the go-for-it crapulence of Royal Trux or the angel dust arrangements of Captain Beefheart. But wait, come back! It's listenable! The song structures piece together like Humpty Dumpty, and the logic of the mixing comes across as Venetian or Inuit. Yet, it flows from the band purely, never forced. The sheer exuberance pulls you through as toy pianos, organs, slide guitars, handclaps, and other junk is spit at you wrapped in the seductive fever-dream imagery of the mysterious Friedberger siblings. Sometimes the greatest lore is that which you have to make up yourself. --Brent DiCrescenzo

42: Broadcast

HaHa Sound * __
[Warp]__

In a year where old was the new new, Broadcast dug a decade deeper than the post-punk revivalists, emerging with a delicious pastiche of the 60s that were overshadowed by Woodstock and the hippie movement: Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra soundtracks, early Moog demo albums, Perrey & Kingsley records, and synth pioneers Silver Apples and The United States of America. "Pendulum" is Stereolab with spikes, resident chanteuse Trish Keenan's lovely voice slinking through a swarm of buzzing, blipping synths and chimes. Neil Bullock's spacious drums provide otherwordly rhythm to Broadcast's weightiest batch of songs yet, the band pays direct tribute to electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott on the skittering "Man Is Not a Bird", and it's impossible to deny the transcendent weirdness of headcase pop like "Lunch Hour Pops" and "The Little Bell". HaHa Sound is every bit the exuberant aural celebration its title implies: forty-five minutes in Willy Wonka's grandfather clock would probably sound about like this. --Joe Tangari

41: The Darkness * __
Permission to Land__ *[Atlantic]

The incessant, dull arguments over whether the Darkness actually are a serious band need to stop immediately. While the band's unabashedly 80s aesthetic may serve as a fine marketing tool for the suit-and-ties over at Atlantic Records, the inspiration behind the band's majestic din of rock runs much deeper. The chunky guitar riffage of "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" rips a page out of the Angus Young lexicon of riffology and sloppily pastes it to the liner notes of Cheap Trick's Dream Police, managing to sound more classic than classic rock has in two decades. The heroin romp "Givin' Up" (sample lyric: "I'd inject it into my eyes/ If there was nowhere else to stick my skag") swaggers like The Stones in their heyday, while the acoustic ballad "Love Is Only a Feeling" brims with Zeppelin's idyllic passion and mythology. How could anyone doubt the ingenuity of a group who opens their debut record with a speaker-exploding rocker named "Black Shuck" about a rabid one-eyed dog that wreaks havoc on priests? Honestly. --Hartley Goldstein